Becoming Black Womxn Through Embodied Inquiry

Construct One: Ancestral Spirituality

James (2017) asserts that African Diasporic communities have maintained embodied customs – through relationships with Land, Ancestors, and Orisha (alexander, 2020) – as ways to retrieve knowledge through Sacred relationships for scholarship and praxis. She defines “Sacred” as welcoming Ancestors into a space (2017); Okpalaoka and Dillard (2012) define it as honoring and embracing work that is carried out with reverence. In the west, Sacred knowledge has been embodied through providing sanctuary and nourishment for members of the Black Diaspora, and in preserving language, music, dance, rituals, and plant and spoken medicine (James, 2017; O’Brien, 1978; Takagi, 1999; Wade, 1964). Dillard et al. (2000) speak of Diasporic spiritual knowledge being shared through scholarship and pedagogy as poems, stories, songs, dialogue, etc. James asserts these practices as being rooted in Yoruba Orisha Traditions (YOT; 2017) a femme-led Pan-African spiritual system that formed in the west – founded on traditions from the Yoruba, Ewe, Fon, Kikôngo, and Dahomean tribes that survived the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (alexander, 2020).

YOT is a perfect example of what Henry (2006) calls “Middle passage epistemology.” Citing Gundaker (1998) and Diedrich et al. (1999), Henry names this frame as giving Blacks in the west a “double vision” or “ability to see across cultural and physical boundaries” (Gundaker, 1998). Henry also claims this ability as coming from our inability to completely remove our knowledge from spatial and historical locations of Africa – causing us to live in a liminal space wherein we try to rediscover Ancestral ways in contemporary contexts (Diedrich et al., 1999; Henry, 2006). Dillard (2014) claims that, “[s]pirituality, in African-centered thought is the very essence of African people, regardless of where we are in the world” (p. 278). Myers et al. (1991) refer to all persons as their most actualized or “optimal” when their physical and spiritual selves are unified.

Construct Two: Lived Experience

Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (EFE; Dillard, 2006) asserts that the definition of “knowledge” for/by/about/with Black womxn should arise from our communities wherein scholarship takes place (alexander, 2020). Like James and Myers and her associates, it accounts for our specific cultural contexts and lived experiences as grounding epistemic practices. It also aligns with the work of Collins by recognizing that (a) Black womxn produce knowledge within contexts of power structures, and (b) sociohistorical oppressions inform frames and methods through which we do so. Additionally, Collins’ Black Feminist Standpoint Theory (BFST; 1997, 2000) positions poor Black womxn as experts on society, their own lives, and the lives of other groups with relatively more social power (alexander, 2022a). BFST is a retort to Feminist Standpoint Epistemology (FSE; Harding, 1986, 1992) that also complicates Hegel's master/slave dialectic by addressing intersectionalities (Collins, 1997; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) of racism, sexism, and classism as informing epistemic practice. Focusing on class struggle, “Hegel held that the slave's knowledge of reality is more advanced than that of the master's because they must understand both the master's world and their own to survive” (alexander, 2022a, p. 735).

Construct Three: Community

Dillard (2014) identifies research as both an intellectual and spiritual pursuit of historical and communal purpose. She also asserts that practices of scholarship are intrinsic in the African Diaspora, as we try to connect unfamiliar (read: non-African) languages, traditions, and cultural knowledges to our Ancestral homes to actualize our own communal ideologies. James (2017) presumes historical and contemporary epistemic practices as communal. To this point: she contextualizes YOT as part of her work with Trade/itions, a 2016 symposium hosted at City University of New York that centered activism, cultural arts, and Orisha/Orisa/Orixa/Oricha traditions in the west (alexander, 2020). Myers (1988) and her associates (1991) suggest that spiritual connection with others is requisite for anyone to become optimally. Dillard (2014) presents five guiding principles for research methodologies that are based on EFE, all of which make community both requisite for and benefactors of Black womxn's epistemic practices.

Love: an intention and act of will in extending oneself to nurture one's own or another's growth, (Peck, 1978) – which creates more reciprocity in scholarship (hooks, 2000).

Embodying the Constructs as Inquiry

My experiences in scholarship about, teaching of, and service and practice with Black womxn and girls have led me to believe that our knowledges are inherently embodied. Black womxn speak about knowledge in terms of what we learn through trial and error, what we hear from friends and see in our families, stories about our Ancestors, our familiarity with certain places and the conditions there, and how situations intuitively make us feel. Importantly, embodiment allows us to make sense of, navigate, survive, and thrive in many settings and situations – for ourselves, and for and with others. W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) called this epistemic state a “second sight” that members of the Black Diaspora have developed in response to being oppressed through westernization (as cited in Henry, 2006). The potential of embodiment makes it an essential framework in inquiries for/by/about/with Black womxn if we are to be full participants in them, because each Black womxn is uniquely embodied. Embodiment's premise also aligns with values of feminist social work; thence, scholars should feel encouraged to expand its use in service to making inquiry more liberatory. I offer examples of embodied projects later in this piece to support scholars’ exploration of the frame; however, it is important to first understand how it is related to social science's more conventional ones.

Embodiment ↔ Postmodernism

Postmodern epistemology holds that knowledge is subjective, and that there is no, “one true story” about reality to be discovered through inquiry (Zalewski, 2011). This supports the notion of embodiment that allows for infinite manifestations of truth. Hesse-Biber (2014) asserts that postmodern and feminist epistemologies converge on a shared aim of empowering oppressed groups by bringing them into scholarly consciousness and asking new questions by centering subjugated knowledge (Gannon & Davies, 2012). While the language of “new” discounts long existences of scholarly consciousness beyond academia, “subjugated” aligns with critical frameworks like feminist critiques by recognizing that knowledge is constructed in and by social groups against whom power is systematically exercised. Karl Marx argued that all knowledge is constructed subjectively, and that society's power elites construct it to justify social inequities that they create (as cited in Harding, 1986). Black womxn's embodiments challenge this misuse of elite power, by enabling us to exercise our own through doing knowledge however we see fit.

Embodiment ↔ Poststructuralism

Poststructural epistemologies account for people/their bodies as sites of both knowledge production (Haraway, 1991) and exercises of power. They also present concepts of people continuously becoming through performing or doing who and what they are (e.g., Butler, 1990) as living methodologies that interact with their histories, experiences, and ways of knowing (Childers, 2013; Voithofer, 2013). Pelias (2012) claims that the body is political and methodological because its performances – informed by fluid locations and cultures – continuously and simultaneously reify, undermine, and create new knowledge. Somerville (2004) makes similar arguments while considering the body's liminality among theories of knowledge production. These ideas align with embodiment, because they treat a person as a living theory – based on the person's cultures, contexts, experiences, environments, etc.

Heron and Reason (1997) name poststructural epistemic practices that expand beyond intellectual abstraction as “extended epistemology,” which aligns with embodiment through doing knowledge. They present four forms of knowledge creation: (a) experiential: encounters with others, the world, and contexts in which a person lives; (b) presentational: a means to (re)present experiential knowledge through arts, storytelling, images, movement and dance, etc.; (c) propositional: knowledge that is grounded in exploration; and (d) positional: a skill or ability, based on all other forms of knowledge, manifest as action (Seeley, 2014). These epistemic forms are cyclically generative: a person creates new knowledge by living out their existing knowledge.

Embodiment ↔ Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism positions non-westerners as experts on western violence, as targets of it. This positioning supports deconstructing western perspectives of the world as its “mainstream” epistemic regime (Christophers, 2007; Iwowo, 2014) – and thus challenges westerners’ rendering nonwestern knowledge as “new,” inferior, or nonexistent. Postcolonialism examines epistemic practices in ways that are consistent with other post-critical frames, but for the purpose of challenging abuses of power in a modern world that assumes everyone to have the same (read: western) knowledge practices and priorities. One of its central tenets is colonial subjection: westerners treating non-westerners as subjects/objects (or the “subaltern”) of their imaginations – about whom they have authority to create knowledge (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1987, 1988) and make decisions. Postcolonialism's purpose makes it adaptable with (and possibly a practice of) embodiment: non-westerners construct knowledge through geographic, cultural, and sociohistorical contexts of colonial violence. Nandy (1983) encourages non-westerners to resist said violence by continuing to live out their cultural traditions, despite navigating impacts of westernization in their daily lives (Prasad, 2003). That recommended practice is adaptable to embodiment, and it highlights the need for theories of change that center Black womxn.

Bridging Epistemologies Through Embodied Practices

These epistemic frames center history, lived experience, social positionings, and interactions with environments as cruxes for how to do knowledge – as does embodiment. They also jointly assert that no “universal knowledge” exists about any topic: all knowledge is fluid, subjective, contextual, and reflective of power structures in which it exists. This characterization of knowledge is common among scholars who do culturally-responsive research. In a recent volume on this very topic (alexander & Pasque, 2022), my colleague and I identify several practices among said scholars that align with these frames and embodiment. They are: (a) doing inquiry in service to advancing inquiries’ approaches, as a longer-term “meta” project; (b) designing projects to be individualized for a particular community; (c) engaging liminalities of researchers in their projects, which may include being members of an inquiry's group/community of focus; and (d) explicitly politicizing inquiry as an intentional practice of anti-oppression. Where these practices are missing from inquiries for/by/about/with Black womxn, scholars risk harming us through disembodiment.

A/r/tography

A/r/tography is an interdisciplinary, nonlinear, and collectivistic approach wherein participants are simultaneously a rtists, r esearchers, and t eachers. A/r/tographers aim to engage knowing, doing, and making by interpreting and representing knowledge through creative praxes (e.g., dancing, photography, poetry, etc.; Irwin, 2012; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004). Key to a/r/tography is that theory and practice are unified as living inquiries, which are predicated on the fact that lives are constantly changing. For that reason, people make meaning of themselves in their day-to-day between being with themselves and being with other people (Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Nancy, 2000) – where their “self” is the site of epistemic practice. A/r/tography is participatory action research (e.g., photovoice, Wang & Burris, 1997; Wilson & Flicker, 2014). As such, creative texts (e.g., poems, exhibits) are interpretations of knowledge that performers might share to prompt relationships of inquiry (e.g., learning communities or art collectives). Living inquiry is embodied such that art arises from and informs everyday life – thus knowing, doing, and making are simultaneously emotional, spiritual, intuitive, and cognitive (Irwin, 2012).

Literature about Black womxn's a/r/tography emphasizes healing from harms that are Ancestral, contemporary, tangible, intangible, public, and private. As a scholar of the 1950s–1970s Black Arts Movement (BAM), McMillon (2018) expands on Henry's “Middle passage epistemology” and Du Bois’ “second sight” to name us as having, “spirit-consciousness, that connection to the ancestors that is always pulling Black bodies, particularly Black women, between two worlds as they negotiate a universe filled with racialized minefields” (p. 176) – which we activate through making and sharing art that canonizes our Ancestors. BAM fostered an explosion of Black creatives and venues that celebrated Blackness throughout the global Black Diaspora, and McMillon argues that Black womxn were at its fore. McMillonand Waters (2018) documented our a/r/t/ography at the 2016 BAM Conference: like Trade/itions that same year, the conference brought together artists as living inquiries who taught and learned Ancestral knowledge. It was hosted by Dillard University and Harvard University's Hutchins's Center in New Orleans, one of the most Ancestrally significant cities in the west for descendants of the Slave Trade.

The BAM conference was a space for practicing public embodiment. In contrast: the work of Jacobs and Davis (2017) – a Black clinical social worker and mixed-race art therapist, respectively – presents a more private practice of a/r/tography through therapy for Black womxn in the DC metropolitan area who srvived childhood abuse and neglect. Jacobs and Davis facilitated group sessions that included artmaking and trauma-informed discussions. Emerging themes centered on myths and stereotypes about Black womxn, sexuality, invisibility, and hope. Jacobs and Davis highlight how participants co-created knowledge about Black womxn's lives through sharing their personal stories and/in their art, as they forged safety together.

Critical Geography

Critical geography is the examination of physical spaces as social constructions wherein daily realities are de/re/constituted, negotiated, and performed (alexander, 2022b; Ko & Hong, 2019; Lefebvre, 1991). Ko and Hong call attention to ways that peoples’ inter/actions and movements in a space shape and are shaped by conditions that are fluid, simultaneous, and overlapping – (2019) and thus, allow for both meaning- and place-making by participants within and beyond a given inquiry. Soja (1996, 2010) asserts that spaces are neither dead nor neutral – but filled with spatial, social, and historical materials that inform experiences of and within them. Lefebvre also implicates political, cultural, economic, and legal conditions as informing interactions in spaces.

Literature about Black womxn's (and girls’) practices of critical geography suggests that we prioritize making sense of our environments as spaces of subalternity, to construct alternative spaces (e.g., BAM or art-informed group therapy) that help to keep us safe. Moreover: our practices are underpinned by intersectionalities of racism, sexism, and classism that render our lives less valuable than the lives of others in the west. Citing Jones (2010), McCurn's (2018) ethnography examined how Black womxn and girls from Oakland's poorer neighborhoods pursued access to clothing that signaled them as belonging to a higher social class than their own, explicitly as a survival strategy. They understood that their lack of protection from structural and interpersonal violence was informed by their intersecting race, class, and gender; thus, they sought protection and respect by embodying womxn and girls who they perceived to receive both in society.

Where the Black girls in Oakland reconstituted themselves to navigate their spaces safely, the Black mothers who danced as strippers in Mayers’ Atlanta-based ethnography (2019) reconstituted strip clubs as spaces of fantasy – and themselves as subjects/objects of desire. Importantly, they did so to encourage patrons to spend more money – and thus, support their social mobility. Like these mothers, the Black femme leaders of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance created communal food systems across the Deep South and Midwest as spaces that Black people could use to liberate themselves from racism, classism, and patriarchy (Reese & Cooper, 2021). The Alliance named stopping Black farmers’ land loss, retaining Black dignity, and supporting Black sustainability and health as their motivations for forming in 2016.

Relationships as Inquiry

A more loosely-defined embodied approach is examining relationships – among scholars, and with their study participants and studies themselves – as sites of inquiry in their own rights. Field researcher Caretta (2015) uses Haraway's (1991) situated knowledge to highlight how contextual, hierarchical, and experiential relationships impacted epistemic practices among community members of an East African village, her field assistants, and herself. In addition to accounting for their own liminal positionalities, Caretta (2015) and Hordge-Freeman (2018) bring attention to the importance of researchers weaving personal, professional, political, physical, and emotional experiences into their projects. Both assert that scholar subjectivities interact with those of participants to inform data they co-construct. For this reason, Hordge-Freeman suggests that researchers (a) take time to build personal relationships with participants and (b) pay attention to their own emotions as indicative of needing to revise study procedures, protocols, and techniques (2018). Vanner (2015) similarly suggests that they develop data collection and analysis plans with participants, to foreground participants’ cultures and ethics in studies.

Oba's (2018) study of an Afrocentric community program as intervention for Black youth in Toronto encapsulates recommendations from Caretta, Hordge-Freeman, and Vanner. The program was co-designed and co-facilitated by Black Elders and youth; it included focus groups, and many of the cultural practices that I discuss as part of my constructs for embodiment. Oba's inquiry of the program was consistent with practices of culturally responsive research: she described her process for collecting and analyzing data as subjective and political such that her choices reflected who she was as a Black person, community member, parent, and social worker. Although Oba's experience was one of inclusion, it should not be presumed as a given because scholars share Blackness (and womxnhood) with potential study participants. Beoku-Betts (1994) recounts her challenges in gaining trust with Black womxn in the Gullah/Geechee communities of South Carolina and Georgia for her fieldwork: despite sharing race, gender, and rural roots, Beoku-Betts and the womxn did not share nationality, class, ethnic cultures, or values about womxn's roles in society. Community members also did not trust Beoku-Betts as a researcher from a western institution. Thus, she had to invest more effort than she anticipated into building rapport by assuming community duties. Although research convention might frame these challenges negatively, they are generative when framed through constructs of embodiment.

In black feminism in qualitative inquiry (2019), scholar and clinical practitioner Evans-Winters characterizes Black womxn's processes of developing knowledge – including about other people – as slow, organic, mosaic-like, holistic, multi-textual, sacred, and communal (pp. 137–139). Citing Dillard and hooks, she calls these processes part of “daughtering” (p. 137) – which she describes as coming with no handbook, requiring keen observation, decoding others’ words, withstanding others dismissing us and our knowledge, and serving others. Perhaps as an illustration of daughtering: Evans-Winters presents excerpts from reciprocal text message exchanges that she sustained with an inquiry informant for two years. Through them, she and the informant entered each other's worlds as Black womxn; reflective of embodiment's spiritual, lived, and communal nature, she describes this text exchange as a “call and response” (p. 121).

Doing Embodied Inquiry

These exemplars position researchers to engage in practices for/by/about/with Black womxn by doing knowledge alongside us in ways that honor our ancestry, creativity, daily experiences, and needs for spaces of safety and/in community. The cited scholars lived out knowledge by becoming in their research environments and processes: they had to confront legacies of positivism, racism, imperialism, classism, and other agents of disembodiment. As a scholar, I prioritize becoming by creating projects of which I can be a part. For example, I have designed a curriculum for a culture-informed therapeutic peer mentoring program to serve Black femme people (alexander, 2022c. The program's intention is to encourage participants to embody knowledge through exploring their unique Ancestral and familial ties, communing with nature, engaging their geospatial locations and emotions, and creating art for collective inquiry and teaching. The curriculum allows me to participate in it, which gives me an opportunity to do culturally responsive inquiry through being embodied alongside other Black womxn.

Considering Embodied Inquiry in Social Work

Scholars should seek to understand the origins, significance, and operationalization of epistemic, ontological, and axiological constructs in Black womxn's lives to avoid disembodying and pathologizing our knowledge that transcends academe's conventions. As living inquires, we can engage our unique ancestries, spiritualities, experiences, senses of community, and countless other constructs as part of how we contribute to projects’ framings, data collection and analysis plans, findings disseminations, etc. It is pivotal that scholars engage our constructs in their work, especially in projects that claim to be for our benefit, for several reasons.

First, social work's knowledge conventions are rooted in practices that cannot fully accommodate Black womxn. For example: studies that explore participants’ interactions with(in) their environments reflect social constructivist models. Said approaches can highlight Black womxn's contextual sensemaking, but do not typically engage physi(ologi)cal, Ancestral, and/or spiritual axiologies or ontologies writ large. Positivist approaches forego embodied knowledge entirely because it is incompatible with the Scientific Method (alexander & Pasque, 2022) – except for sensory observations that are presumed to be “universal,” which is a disembodying assumption. Critical frames interrogate power structures as influencing epistemic processes, but do so while discursively assuming that these structures are fixed in society. These approaches have yielded invaluable knowledge about Black womxn's experiences, environments, and needs, but they are rooted in frames that are removed from our approaches – and thus cannot fully engage us as producers, sites, theories, performers, or performances of knowledge.

Second, and related: Black womxn's epistemologies include axiological and ontological constructs that extend beyond those that social work most often presupposes in womxn's lives, because they are constituted through embodied intersectionalities of racism and classism alongside sexism – as well as other oppressions like imperialism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc. Consistent with feminist social work principles and theories of change that center womxn of Color, improving our lives via scholarship requires addressing these inequities as part of inquiry; this piece's exemplar inquiries offer possible models for doing so. To this point: exploration of embodiment's relationship to “post” frames suggests that opportunities exist for scholars to engage in storytelling for/by/about/with Black womxn through prioritizing how we each become and do knowledge in our daily lives while navigating social issues that led us to social work – as clients, practitioners, students, etc. – in the first place. In support of feminist social work, embodied approaches can (a) engage interactions, integrations, and exercises of power across contexts, (b) account for unique countless constructions of knowledge, and (c) dismantle power differentials between scholars and participants through shared humanity in inquiry.

Preparing to Do Embodied Scholarship

As with embodiment itself, there are infinite entry points for engaging with it through a scholar's chosen constructs, theories, methods, etc. However, taking such a turn requires what Voithofer (2013) calls a promiscuity of methodologies. Citing Butler, Dillard, Crenshaw, and others, Voithofer argues that promiscuous methodologies allow for customized examinations in inquiry by destabilizing (a) sociocultural categories that inform structures of oppression (i.e., the “parts” of a person), and (b) the notion that certain methods must be used for certain types of projects. Such a shift could help to liberate social work inquiry for/by/about/with Black womxn from confines of certain schools of thought, fields of study from which scholars borrow, methods of data collection and analysis, etc. It could also help to liberate Black womxn by expanding how we are each constituted in knowledge projects, as living methodologies and inquiries.

For scholars who hesitate to fully delve into embodied approaches: the cited examples illustrate how this frame can be integrated with social science's more conventional ones through a methodological promiscuity that creates space for subjective knowledge. Most of the studies employed popular methods (e.g., focus groups and participant observations), but none of them used said methods as their sole approach to inquiry. Instead: all required researchers to do knowledge as mutual members of a community by “bringing their whole selves” (Hordge-Freeman, 2018) into their inquiries’ processes (rather than remaining distant and “scientific”; alexander & Pasque, 2022). In doing so, these scholars leaned into being vulnerable and flexible in their projects – consistent with feminist social work principles of egalitarian relationships, engaging emotional knowledge while doing the work, and closing power differentials therein.

Methodological promiscuity allows scholars to have feminist relationships with their studies’ participants, processes, and audiences – and with themselves. A liberation of this sort can support them in redefining and re-operationalizing knowledge construction, power, and positioning in ways that uphold feminist social work principles and promote theories of change that engage and amplify Black womxn's epistemic practices. Moreover, it can help scholars to become embodied in their inquiries while creating possibilities for nuanced explorations of Black womxn's embodiments with consideration for each of our gender expressions, a/romantic lives, disabilities, home geographies, socioeconomic statuses, and additional infinite manifestations of our personhoods. Such nuance would further enrich projects for/by/about/with Black womxn: each manifestation of our humanity carries its own possible constructs through which we embody knowledge more complexly as living inquiries. The intersectional possibilities of these constructs are beyond what I could address here, but they each deserve exploration through their epistemic, axiological, and ontological frames. I look forward to the continued growth of discourses in support of this broader knowledge project in social work research and practice, to uplift Black womxn's ways of being and knowing in work that is for/by/about/with us.